I am excited to see that the next two upcoming Liferay LIVE webinars will be based on integrating popluar open source e-commerce platforms into Liferay. September 11th will be a LIVE session over Integrating KonaKart into Liferay and the September 18th session will be over integrating Broadleaf Commerce and e-commerce integration strategies.

If you have not attended a Liferay LIVE webinar yet, this is a great place to start. Liferay LIVE sessions are "live" presentations / demos that are also recorded for you to view at a later time. You can go to https://www.liferay.com/events/web-events to register for future events and to also view the video and / or presentations from past events.

I am currently attending the local Liferay Chicago User Group meeting which is being held at the Metropolitan Club on the 66th floor of the Willis Tower in downtown Chicago. This is my first user group experience and so far it has been great and am very impressed with the turnout and presentations!

As you can see with the picture below, the attendance was really good for this month's event. The LCUG meets on the last Thursday of every month, typically downtown.

Several customers, community members, partners and Liferay assoicates attended the meeting. Our partner Dunn Solutions helped sponsor and organize this months meeting. We were also pleased to have representatives from our partners Edgilent, Cignex DATAMATICS and Thirdwave in attendance.

The view from the user group meeting was exceptional as well, as you can see it was fairly cloudy morning in Chicago!

Our certified service partner, Isos Technology, has released a new blog series titled 'Practical Liferay Series'. The series focuses on tips and insights for deploying and running Liferay on a variety of configurations. There are some very interesting topics and examples given by some of Isos's experienced engeineeers. Check them out below:

Liferay's Hamilton office has now officially been open for about 4 weeks and we have had some great visitors. Starting this summer I will be inviting more of our certified Liferay Service Partners to our office to get some quality one on one time with not only myself, but our wonderful sales team that are located here as well.

Two weeks ago we had our partner Lister Technologies in for a visit. It was a great visit in which both Josh Asbury - Director of Corporate Sales and myself got to spend some quality time with both Kumar Sivaraman (CEO) and Preetam Kumar (VP Biz Dev), see photo below. We really appreciate Kumar taking the time to stop by for a visit while visitng the US for a few weeks.

Lister Technologies is headquartered in India with a strong customer presense in the US. Kumar resides in India while Preetam is located in the US running biz dev for the US territory. Our meeting consisted of sharing ideas from marketing, sales, e-commerce implementations which they specialize in as well as the concept of Extreme Off-Shoring. Lister is the pioneer of the Extreme Off-Shoring model which is based off of the traditional off-shore model, but fixes the pain points including on-shore project / architecture meetings and such. To learn more check out their site at: http://www.listertechnologies.com/index.html

Recently I began to blog about some of our partners activites out in the "real" world including several marketplace applications that they are currently developing. Today I would like to point out Rivet Logice's HR Portal marketplace application. Rivet Logic's Liferay experts used their experience and lessons learned to implement a fully functional generic HR Portal solution for the Liferay community. The portal includes much sought after features such as:

These features were implemented with both end-users and content authors in mind. With this solution, HR personnel responsible for disseminating corporate news of different kinds, now have the ability to intuitively author content without the need for any HTML or CSS knowledge. The look-and-feel of the portal and its content is fully automated via smart templates that utilize Liferay's categories (or taxonomy) to identify news publishing channels.

For more information about this portlet and to contact the contributor for the source please go to: http://www.liferay.com/marketplace/-/mp/application/21696913

We have some awesome certified partners and I want to start pointing out some of the great stuff they are doing including marketplace applications that they are starting to upload for community usage. The first application is the My Shortcuts portlet .

This portlet is developed by Youngsoft, Inc. Liferay Platinum Service Partner in America. My Shortcuts portlet is a very simple portlet which lets user create shortcuts using Shortcut title & Shortcut URL. It is much simplified version of out of box Bookmarks portlet. Each user can have individual shortcuts for each liferay site. Portlet also keeps track of basic auditing information such as create date, modified date & created by. Guest users cannot create shortcuts using this portlet.

Key Technical Leanings:----------------------------------Portlet provides great example to learn following aspects of portlet programming:1. Perform CRUD operations using Liferay’s Service Builder.

Starting this week I am going to be posting some information from some of our excelletn partners and their blog posts which are extremely helpful when it comes to customer use cases and more in depth overviews of some of the different features available in the latest versions of Liferay products.

Liferay's SAML implementation is built on top of OpenSAML 2.0 and is available as a Liferay Enterprise Edition plugin. For more information on this particular topic, please check out Xtivias blog and feel free to comment or request more information.